versão impressa ISSN 0102-6909

Resumo

The fact that modernity, as a historical event, emerges with modern science and technique, shows all its virulence today. It is even possible to say that this modernity is so embedded in "technique" that it can be named and characterized as a "technical modernity." This article proposes that such a concept can be used to reveal the essence and to discuss the emergency of this modernity in order to evoke, on one hand, its processual and historical event and, on the other hand, its highly unstable and unpredictable degree. Giving its contingent character, the technique contributes to a deprivation of a rationality of ends predominance, something characteristic of the historical phase in which the capitalism appeared within a contingent rationality. This rationality reveals the Being scientifically and technically but without revealing an end to be reached that could give direction or even identify its limits. With no direction or limits, the technical modernity is developed rationally, lacking protection against irrational oscillations that progressively punish its route. The article presents the German national-socialism, the Russian communism and the American democracy as three ideal types of the technical modernity. A comparative glance in the direction of this modernizing triad of the XXth century shows the indifference for values for the technical modernity at the same time that promotes the understanding of the contingent and irrational phenomena generated in this process.